1. Field of the Invention
The subject matter disclosed herein relates to designing Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) using file translation approaches.
2. Brief Description of the Related Art
PCB design software is well known by those in the industry. Previous designs may have been created in PCB design software that is now obsolete or no longer in use by organizations due to a lack of support for this infrastructure. Oftentimes, it is necessary to modify an existing PCB design for enhancement of the product. In such a scenario, a Gerber file, or a universally acceptable output of most PCB design software describing the layout of each layer of a PCB in addition to corresponding shape constraints, may be used to import into current PCB design software and may be converted into electrical format. Most existing PCB design software currently in use allows importing the Gerber data as-is. Alternatively, the Gerber data can be converted to a different format (such as Drawing Exchange Format or DXF) and subsequently importing new information in the same DXF format.
The process to convert an existing file to a current readable output is oftentimes tedious and repetitive in nature. Each element of the Gerber data must be manually entered into the software currently in use. This manual entry oftentimes results in the inefficient usage of resources and may generate numerous errors, which may lead to incorrect PCB designs.